


sentir le sapin

by sepulcher



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Character Study, Depression, Gen, Immortality, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:00:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25406545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sepulcher/pseuds/sepulcher
Summary: comme un long sanglot, tout chargé d'adieux./ like a long sob, charged with farewells.Or: the study of a man desperate to die.
Relationships: Booker | Sebastian le Livre & Everyone, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 36
Kudos: 482





	sentir le sapin

**Author's Note:**

> _sentir le sapin:_ french phrase that literally means _to smell the pine_. refers to the fact that during the seventeenth century, many coffins were made in pine wood. this expression means _to feel a death omen, that death is near_.
> 
> welcome to this mess that's, for all intents and purposes, a character study on everyone's favorite ( or least favorite ) depressed bastard, booker. this isn't entirely canon compliant with the comics, since i didn't watch the backstory video until after i was halfway done with this, so bear in mind that i changed some things about his origins to make it more congruent with what he told nile in the movie.
> 
> please keep in mind the tags, this fic is overflowing with just the worst possible coping mechanisms on booker's part, and tread lightly if you're triggered by any of the topics listed. nonetheless, this is a delve into booker's history and his relationships with the others, and is pretty indulgent, i have to admit. also, it isn't really beta'd. enjoy!

_Et les choses qu'on crut éternelles s'écroulent._  
And the things believed to be eternal are crumbling.  
—— Victor Hugo

You always remember your first. The first time he died there was a battle raging around him and he had been shot. It had been messy, as death tends to be, and slotted between his ribs. Shattering them, a bit. He fell amongst his brethren, rearing back and crashing to the ground, and heard a shout of his name, but war is war and they may well die, too. No time to worry for the fallen, now.

The sky was blue and beautiful and he stared at it, desperately, fearfully, thinking of his beautiful wife and how she had looked on the day of their wedding. Radiant, incandescent, and he felt humbled and so mortal in her presence. She still looked so beautiful on the day that he kissed her goodbye, riding off to war. He thought of her and her laugh, and their sons, how he had wept each first time he held one of them in his arms. So tiny. Little bundles of joy who he swore to protect.

They were beautiful final thoughts, truly. And then he died.

And then he came back to life with a gasp and a jerk, ribs snapping back together and skin dragging itself closed as battle raged on around him and faced flashed before his eyes. Unfamiliar ones. Not the smile of his wife nor the laughter of his boys, no. A woman, hard faced and wounded, two men, militant and reaching, and another —— drowning. Dying. Coming to life again. He came to life again with a gasp and a shudder and, when his sight cleared of those strange visions, he saw the sky once more.

Here’s the funny thing: in that moment, amidst the hazy panic of his mind, he thought himself blessed by the Lord, for he had another chance to see his beautiful family once more.

Poor bastard.

* * *

It was so fucking easy to pretend that he hadn’t died at all, that day. That he had been winded and fell and lost his mind for a moment or two or dozen. Death isn’t something to return from. It’s impossible, outright heretical, and nonsensical to boot. It was decidedly less easy to pretend as though he didn’t continue seeing those faces in his dreams. That woman, steady jawed. Those men, hands intertwined. The other woman, drowning and dying and coming alive again and again and again.

He started to get twitchy. Strung out. Nerves shot and frayed, breaths coming in gasps every now and then as if he, too, were drowning somewhere deep beneath the surface. He even started to hate water, after a time, much to the bemusement of his compatriots. But they expected as much from him, the man who was sentenced to this life.

“Sebastian,” a hand on his shoulder, dragging him from his reverie, a bottle of alcohol held loosely in his hands, “you reek,” good humored, maybe. Disgusted, probably. Pitying? Who knows.

He laughed, too much, too loudly. Ordered another round or five. Dunked his head into a river and screamed into its streams and wondered if this is what drowning felt like when you were the one drowning, rather than the woman in your dreams. Broke the surface with the gasp, hands shaking, thinking about her screams echoing through the water, unheard. About the steady woman. About the others. About his wife and his sons and his family.

Died, again. A few more times, in fact, frenetic and crazed and reckless in battle, feeling as though he were coming apart at the seams. He tried to run, once. They killed him. Seemed to turn a blind eye to the fact that he lived.

* * *

Returning home was like breaking the surface of the ocean: a relief, life giving, and acutely painful, lungs spasming beneath the weight of air filling them all at once.

Their small home resided just outside of Paris. Quaint and modest and beautiful, and the smile that his wife gave him rivaled the sun as he strode towards the place that he left so long ago, dread and loneliness and desperation giving way to happiness at the sight of her and it was so fucking easy to pretend when he held her in his arms.

Their boys visited, too, once they got word that he had returned. It was all so easy.

The dreams continued. The three who weren’t drowning were somewhere else, a place that he couldn’t recognize and had never been. The woman drowning kept drowning. When he shuddered awake in the dead of night, sweat soaked and gasping as he gulped air as if it were the first time he had tasted it in hundreds of years his wife touched his face gently as he held her tighter. Tighter.

He had come alive so he could see her again. So he could see their family again. So he could keep living and breathing. He hadn’t died in the dead of winter in Russia because he was meant to be there, holding her in his arms. Because he was meant to grow old with her.

Pretending, and all.

* * *

They, which is to say the woman with the steady hands and the men with their war foraged love, began to cross the ocean some years later. Sebastian held his wife in his arms desperately as she struggled against illness, still as beautiful as the day he fell in love with her as she passed away, staring into his eyes and pleading for him to leave her before he, too, got ill.

“Come back alive,” he whispered against her temple as she went limp in his arms, desperation seeping into his voice as he begged and prayed for mercy, to be able to save her, to give her whatever it is that made him keep living against all sense, “come back to me. Come back to me. I came back to you, we’re meant to grow old together my love, why else would He have returned me to you when I should have died time and time again?”

How long did he hold her? Days. Longer, maybe. Well after her body grew cold and rigid in his arms and he wept and wept and wept.

He should have died of starvation. Of thirst. Of illness.

Of course he didn’t.

(It wasn’t long at all, in honesty. Their sons found them, eventually. He was weeping.)

* * *

It was a brisk spring morning when she found him cutting wood in the small yard of the small home where his wife had died a year and a half ago. They had been getting closer, he had known as much through their dreams, but he hadn’t sought them out. He hadn’t run from them, either, though it had occurred to him. She stood at the edge of his yard as he brought his axe down, brushed the wood aside, and placed another log in its place. Sebastian knew it was her without looking or shifting or speaking, he could feel it in his gut and in the weariness of his bones, a prickle on his flank from the wound that had first killed him.

They stood in mutual silence as he finished with the firewood and, still not looking at her, piled it neatly at the side of his home and walked back through his front doors. Pointedly left the door open for her to enter the frankly depressing sight. Whereas once this place had been beautiful and well kept, by and large by his wife’s attempts moreso than his own, order has been lost. Replaced by bottles strewn and messes left and the reek of a man in mourning, still.

“Who are you?” he finally said, looking about for a bottle that’s not empty and grabbing one sitting on the kitchen table, sitting heavily in one of the chairs and, finally, staring blandly up at the woman in the doorway with her hard face and long dark hair and steady gaze.

“Andromache of Scythia,” she said, voice clear and commanding as an officer as she walked across the threshold and sat in the seat across from him.

He made a noncommittal noise at the name and its strangeness as he yanks the cork from the bottle and takes a swig. He hadn’t drank yet that day, his head was pounding. “What are you?” he paused, jaw setting and mouth thinning, “What am I?”

“We’re immortal,” she said, easy as anything, as if she was accepting of this ridiculous, absurd, impossible thing. That she spoke perfect French didn’t surprise him nearly as much as it should have.

“We’re _unnatural_ ,” the words are bitten, frustrated, there was a sorrow that he had begun to embody long ago, maybe after the third time he died. Something ugly and terrible that he had kept at bay for the sake of his family, but. “Aberrations to God.”

“God isn’t real,” her gaze was fathomless, bottomless, staring at her was something harrowing and just as wrong as their respective, and mutual, existences. He drinks from the bottle again, breaking eye contact. “What is real is that we die and come back to life, good as new, our wounds healing themselves. You can’t refute that.”

“And if we’re trapped at the bottom of the ocean drowning it’s an endless cycle,” it was far too flippant of a statement, strained with a sense of desperation and abruptly broken solitude that drove him halfway out of his mind. It was, also, the wrong thing to say, if the set of her mouth and the brightness of her eyes were anything to go by. The bottle clatters to the table as he rubs his face with his hand, not knowing if he should apologize. Not knowing if he wanted to apologize. “Why are you here? Where are the other two?”

“I’m here to take you with us,” her tone had an edge to it. Not cold, but a less steady compared to what it had been, before. “The dreams aren’t one way. We saw you after the first time that you died. We’ve been looking for you.”

“Take me with you?” he repeated, hand clasped over his mouth as he stared at her. “No.”

“What?” her brows furrowed.

“No,” he said again, hand dropping, “I won’t leave my sons. My family.”

Silence settled for a moment, fraught with tension, deeply unhappy. “You can’t age,” Andromache said, leaning forward in her chair, elbows braced against the table. “You will never grow older than what you appear now. They’ll notice that you won’t get grey hairs, wrinkles, or ill, even when everyone around you is aging and dying.”

Fear gnawed at his innards. Anxiety smarted along his spine. “I won’t leave them,” tone gone darker, heavier, determined.

They stared at each other longer. And longer. Before Andromache stood up and left that small home full of ghosts and memories and half empty rooms and bottles. Sebastian pressed his face into his hands and found himself weeping.

* * *

His second son died first, in battle, not two years after his wife’s death.

His first son died second, in an accident with his own family a decade later.

His third son died last, ailing away in a hospital and screaming at him, raging at him, hating him for being perfectly preserved at the age his son was, not having aged a day in the past twenty odd years. His hatred was blazing as the sun. Burned as terribly, too. Sebastian’s heart, already shattered beyond recognition, felt as though it began to wither away.

* * *

They found him, all three of them, who knows how long later. They found him deep in the streets and refuse of Paris, lying in one shadowy corner or another, filthy and vile and unnatural, an empty gun beside him and an empty bottle atop his abdomen as he considered the sky blearily. Strange, how twenty years ago he had thought it a blessing to see the sky once more, and now it was the worst curse of all.

Niccolò pulled him upward, slinging his arm over his shoulder. Yusuf brushed off his back, patting it bracingly. Andromache watched them at the end of the alley, her arms crossed. He’d like to say he imagined the pity in her eyes, but he doubted it.

* * *

He settled in among them easier than he thought he would. None of them seem to mind that he remained quiet and barbed and distant, at times, and if they do they don’t mention it. Shared experience is what has bound them together, placed them on this singular path, and there was nowhere else for him to go, after all. His wife has long decomposed beneath the ground. His first and second son, too. The third was dead by that point, he could only assume, and a strong pang of regret and despair filled him when he thought of how he hadn’t stayed by his side until the end. There were his grandchildren, but Andromache had been right all those years ago. He hadn’t aged, couldn’t age, remained the same man that he was when he died for the first time so long ago. Sebastian wasn’t able to face his son in his dreams where he shouted and blamed him and called him selfish and cruel for not helping his final child. Therefore, he was certain he couldn’t bear it if his grandchildren began to do the same to him.

So he went with them and they were a small unit of four. They traveled east, first, came to the aid of those in need as if they were a renegade contingent of soldiers not serving beneath one tyrant or another. They fell into line behind Andromache, easy as anything, and he found that it was easier to breathe when there was something else to focus on. Some greater good. Something. Anything but the dreams which plagued him, both drowning and not.

They told him, eventually, Yusuf and Niccolò, about Quynh. About why she was stuck drowning at the bottom of the ocean, how she had gotten there. How the three of them spent decades looking for her to no avail, unable to locate her though they had scoured the ocean as far as they could, as long as they could. That giving up had been the hardest thing that Andromache had ever done, and that they knew she was somewhere down there, though they couldn’t dream about her like Sebastian did.

They had met her, after all.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Andromache some months after the truth about the drowning woman was revealed to him, unprompted and abrupt as they sat beside each other on a couch in some safehouse or another. Their knees pressed together.

“For what?”

“Quynh,” the name felt awkward on his tongue, a language that he had never spoken before, but he tried to say it correctly. Vietnamese was another language that he would have to learn, he imagined. One day. He had all the time in the world. “If I had known, when you first came to me,” how long ago had that been? Fuck, decades. Thirty years, probably more. Should he have started to lose track of time already?

“You didn’t,” Andromache said, firm and weary, suddenly exhausted as though the weight of the world made itself apparent on her shoulders again. Their gazes met, sidelong. Her hair was shorter than it was when they first met, he thought. “It hadn’t occurred to me that you would,” her jaw tensed and for a moment, she looked haunted, nearly as old as he figured she was, “dream about her. I had hoped,” her voice dropped off, lost.

Silence settled between them, stifling. He could apologize again, he supposed, for confirming that Quynh was still alive and dying and alive again, living through an infinite cycle of drowning that was tortuous and terrifying, which plagued his sleeping hours between memories of his wife’s dead body in his arms and his son dying and his son dying and his son screaming at him, despising him at long last. But the apology would be empty, and useless, and he thought that she would resent it. Andromache had known, he was certain beyond a shadow of doubt, that Quynh hadn’t truly died. Not yet.

He had just affirmed that fear.

Guilt sighed through his body, but he was already thoroughly familiar with its presence.

They sat next to each other, quiet but for their breathing and the breeze flowing in through the open window. Somewhere outside, Yusuf and Niccolò were talking, hands intertwined and heads pressed together and smiling. Here, they ruminated, knees still pressed together, his other one bobbing, frenetic and unable to keep still, and he watched its uncontrollable rhythm.

* * *

Sebastian struggled to sleep. Maybe more than the rest, maybe not. Maybe he just had trouble coping with this, whereas they had all had centuries to settle into these unnatural lives. There was the additional fact that he, unlike the rest of them, dreamed of a woman drowning again and again and again. That, compounded with the rest, made sleep hard won and restful sleep a rarity.

Whenever he struggled to sleep or jerked awake or laid there, unwillingly conscious, Yusuf or Niccolò would reach for him. Take his hand or his arm, place a palm on his chest to center him. Andromache would shift closer.

Sometimes he could sleep, like that. Sometimes not.

He appreciated the sentiment all the same.

* * *

Immortal soldiers are able to be reckless, to a point, though the rest were deft at avoidance all the same. It was because they could die, he supposed, just that they couldn’t, yet. Yusuf and Niccolò were the most careful of the four of them, except for when it came to each other, because they had someone to live on for. Andromache held herself in battle the same as she did anywhere else, as though she were a commander and made to lead, to set a flawless example for her soldiers.

And Sebastian? Towards the end of his service to Napoleon he had become foolhardy, rushing straight into battle, throwing himself in front of his brothers in arms as they shouted. None ever suspected, because when he fell it was never for long, and they were relieved that they had not died, and that he seemed whole and hale against all odds. That same sense of recklessness remained with him even now, fifty years removed from that time in his life.

He was acutely aware of the desperate edge to the way that he fought. How ridiculous it was to throw himself in front of the others, in front of blades and bullets and attackers, to bodily protect them when they hadn’t asked for it nor needed it. To die for them, over and over. It didn’t make them nervous, exactly, but it put them on edge, in return.

“Stop that,” Yusuf said as Sebastian gasped alive again, propped against the wall that he had fallen back on, impaled through the heart. The blade that had stabbed him was thrown to the side, he can see, the assailants dead on the floor and Yusuf is kneeling in front of him. Grabs the back of his neck, hand firm and bracing yet somehow gentle, the look in his eyes sorrowful, the set of his mouth disconsolate. They had shaved his head recently and it was growing out again, short, waiting to curl handsomely around his head once more. He pressed their foreheads together and spoke quietly. “There is no need to throw yourself in front of me, Sebastian.”

He laughed, quiet and humorless, and pressed his forehead firmly against Yusuf’s. “Don’t look at me like that. It’s not like I can die. I’m saving you the trouble,” there was a false lightness to his voice, and something seemed to shudder in Yusuf’s expression.

“Sebastian,” he said his name again, almost beseeching. Andromache was speaking, in another room, and there was a weight to Yusuf’s gaze that crushed against his sternum. Sebastian stared into his eyes for a moment longer before looking away and twisting and standing, picking up his weapon from where it fell, the smile on his face wry.

“Come on,” he said, wiping blood on his pant leg. “We have a bastard to finish.”

* * *

He wondered, secretly and not so secretly at all, if they had a death quota they had to meet before they could finally, truly die. If that quota varied per person. Andromache, who has died countless times, far more than any of them by nature of how long she had been alive for. Quynh, who died hundreds of times per day. Their long lost companion who had died so suddenly, but had been with them and lived for far less time.

Logic demanded that there was some _sense_ to when they would finally, truly die. Something inherent to them. Something likely unseen that would remain unknown. Sebastian had a quota, he must have one. It was just how many times would he have to die before he finally died, at last.

But he never wondered as much aloud.

They knew, anyways.

* * *

It was easy to love them. Sebastian wasn’t a man devoid of love in the least. He had loved his family wholeheartedly and absolutely, had loved his country immensely, he was all but overflowing with love at all times. That was simply the way of things, his way of things, for all that love could be seen as weakness. He had known that he loved them within a year of being with them, traveling with them, mired though he was in his own grief. They pulled him out of it, from time to time, ribbed him for drinking to excess, though Andromache joined him more than she didn’t.

They were all they had in this world. The thought was sobering and far too severe, but it was true all the same. It was impossible for them to die, and so it was only natural that they stuck together more than they didn’t, for all that they occasionally split off to wander their own paths. They enacted their own brand of justice and he grew to love that as much as he loved them.

But they fought, at times. There was tension, a natural result of spending so much time around each other nearly without end. When Sebastian would awake gasping and jerking beneath his blankets and they knew that he had dreamed of Quynh, there was always a distance to Andromache, regret hovering over all of them as sharp as a knife, and waiting to fall. When he would die for one of them and they would stare at him, tense and unhappy. When Andromache would grow too sharp and severe. When he would become abruptly jealous of Yusuf and Niccolò and have to leave for however long it took him to calm down.

Jealous? Of course he was jealous of them. Of their love, hardwon and inevitable, if you were to ask either of them. Easily expressed by the way that they looked at each other, how they gravitated to each other, how they centered each other. The tangle of their hands, the closeness of their faces, how they tangled together at night to sleep far more soundly than they ever did when they were apart. They had each other to live for, an eternity ahead of them that was ceaseless until it wasn’t, and Sebastian knew that they tried not to think about the _until it wasn’t_.

They had each other, and they always had, since the beginning of this terrifying journey. Maybe not at the very start, when they killed each other time and time again on the battlefield, but they hadn’t experienced that same isolation that he had. That Andromache had. They had each other, and while they were forced to cope with the other dying, they always returned. No, Sebastian couldn’t imagine the instinctive terror of wondering if each time was the last time, holding the one you love desperately in your arms, but he could never forget the weight of his wife’s cold body in his.

And if he were to fall in love again, it would inevitably be with someone who death could touch. Someone who he could not have for the rest of eternity. Someone to ease this loneliness, to dash away this despair, for mere fragments of his life, before they were gone. Before he was gone.

Don’t misunderstand, he didn’t begrudge them their happiness in the least. He was glad for them, for their happiness, that they could be happy. Happiness and envy weren’t mutually exclusive. Couldn’t be. He was happy for them and their love and how they have nurtured it over hundreds of years and never tired of each other, a true and absolute and eternal love, and he was jealous of them for their luck. For their ability to _be together_ , forevermore.

They all knew of his inherent jealousy. All three of them, and he was never certain if Andromache shared a similar envy as he did, but he didn’t think they ever begrudged him for his jealousy. They never mentioned it, at least, as content as him to simply let it exist.

But he loved them. Had loved them long before he had met them, if he could guess. The easiness between all of them, the familiarity that they shared after decades upon decades alongside each other. The fluidity of them, this new family of his.

* * *

Someone once tried to drown Sebastian to death. He made it worse, probably, by screaming instinctively and struggling as hard as he could. He had died this way dozens of times, hundreds of times, but he hadn’t. Only in his dreams. Only through someone else.

The hands holding him beneath water suddenly left and he flailed, graceless and directionless and unable to figure out which way was up and which way was down. Was this how Quynh felt? All of those years? No. It was worse, he knew. Infinitely worse.

Andromache grabbed his shoulders —— he knew it was her by touch alone, by how she gripped his arms and dragged him out of the water and set him on the ground, half throwing him and kneeling beside him and looking at him, eyes wide and panicked with open fear. A ghost haunting her that wasn’t a ghost at all. Sebastian gasped, desperate for air and held steady against the ground by her, and stared at her. He couldn’t think to offer her reassurance, only wordless thanks, lungs waterlogged and terror gripping him.

Drowning was his least favorite way to die.

* * *

Sometime around the hundredth year since the first time he died he realized, standing on one German street or another waiting for Niccolò, idly admiring a goodlooking couple that had just walked by him, a woman with long dark hair and bright eyes and a man with a strong jaw and light hair and sharp eyes, that he couldn’t quite remember what his wife had looked like. The realization was an unpleasant one, abrupt and sharp like a blade through the ribs. Nauseating, too, as he swayed and leaned heavily against the building and resisted the urge to wretch. He ended up staggering to an alleyway, bending over, breaths coming fast and hard and gasping, eyes wide and unseeing. Unseeing.

What had she looked like? What had she looked like the first time that he saw her? What had she looked like when he fell in love with her? What had she looked like on their wedding day? What had she looked like holding their first son in her arms for the first time? What had she looked like when he kissed her goodbye before going off to war? What had she looked like when he returned?

Lighter hair, when they were young, darker as they grew older, a bit grey when she died. Blonde and wavy and soft. Green eyes, or were they brown, or were they a combination of the two? Her smile was wide and glimmering, or maybe it was softer and radiant all the same. Her hands were soft. No, they were work worn at the palms, soft fingertips —— _what had she looked like_? What was the shape of her eyes, the shape of her nose, were her elbows bony, what had her voice sounded like?

Fuck, what had his _sons_ looked like?

He pressed his face into his hands. Tore through his memory, searching and seeking and finding nothing but dead bodies and a face contorted with rage and hatred and a cold weight in his arms that he held onto for far too long.

“Sebastian?” Niccolò said, touching his shoulder gently.

He lurched and found himself vomiting into the cobblestone below. Niccolò was startled, he’s sure, but grasped his shoulder more firmly. A warm and comforting presence as Sebastian heaved, unsteady and unmade, head spinning and mind aching, despair weaving itself into his bones, multiplying, layering itself within his body, threatening to overtake him.

Niccolò was patient and quiet. Slid his hand from his shoulder to the curve of his back between his shoulder blades, just letting him know that he was present. Sebastian felt more settled into his skin with Niccolò around, but still scattered. Not quite there.

“I can’t remember what she looked like,” he finally said, voice thin and reedy as he stared at his own sick on the ground, “my wife. I can’t remember what my sons looked like, either. Parts, bits and pieces, but,” his eyes burned and Niccolò pulled him further into the alley, away from his sick and from the crowded street beyond, “I can’t remember them. I can hardly remember any memories of them, except,” he cut himself off.

Niccolò cupped his jaw for a moment, affectionate and steady, before pulling him into his arms. Sebastian went easily, pliable and falling into him, pressing his face against his shoulder as he began to weep, body shuddering beneath the weight of his anguish.

How many times can an immortal heart break? Infinitely, of course. But he was never certain if his heart was so capable of pulling itself together as the rest of him.

* * *

During in the aftermath of the second Great War, looking around the wartorn land as they were helping victims get to safety and providing them with supplies, he decided to go by Booker. Some decades before, Andromache had stated to call her Andy, due to the dated nature of her name, and while Sebastian didn’t suffer from the same fate as Andromache did, he fet an acute disconnect with the name. An unsurmountable distance, and while the thought of releasing the name that his mother had given him hollowed him from the inside out, the idea of being called Sebastian anymore fit awkwardly. Like a scarf tied too tight.

The others acquiesed easily enough and Yusuf laughed and touseled his hair and called him _Book_ and he laughed and elbowed him in return.

* * *

In the 60s, or thereabouts, Yusuf and Niccolò started going by Joe and Nicky as they all made their way across Vietnam together, cutting down the Viet Cong and American soldiers and disarming mines as they went.

Booker finally learned Vietnamese. Andy was curiously quiet. Hyperfocused.

* * *

“You have a deathwish,” Andy said one night when Joe and Nicky had gone off to be alone and the pair of them were left in one of their endless hideouts, sitting on two chairs pushed close together, ankles tangled casually. The room was smoky and dim and the radio was on and playing some warbling and thin tune, cigarettes put out in a small dish on the table in front of them. They were nursing their fifth or tenth drinks of the night, he couldn’t really remember and didn’t care to count, and he was considering a spot on the ceiling before she broke their mutual silence.

He turned his head lazily, leaned back against the chair and pivoting on his neck to look at her. Predictably, she was already looking at him, sipping whiskey from her own glass. His free knee, the leg that wasn’t tangled with hers, was bouncing, unable to keep still per usual. They stared at each other, and her gaze was still as fathomless and heavy as it had been when they first met, though he was accustomed to it, now. “Do I?” he said, for lack of anything else to say.

“Don’t play the fool,” she said, thought they both knew he wasn’t. Booker’s recklessness and tendency towards dying wasn’t hidden knowledge among them. Call it an open secret, if you want.

Booker sighed, something pulled deep from his core, heaving and emptying and still he wasn’t empty enough, as his eyes closed and he downed the rest of his drink. Andy’s foot nudged against his and he looked at her again. Looked at her and looked at her and when he spoken it as as if he were miles away, not present in his body at all. “Don’t you ever want it to end, Andy?”

It was admitting it without admitting it and threatened to pull the shreds of his heart from his chest. She’d been alive far longer than the rest of them. He wasn’t sure exactly how long and neither was she, given the responses that she had given him, but it had been thousands of years. Far longer than he could imagine living. Far longer than he wanted to live. He had already lived far longer than he wanted to live. To live for thousands of years, to watch the fall and rise of civilizations, to experience the world changing around you so many times that you can’t even remember exactly how long you had been alive for was unimaginable. It was _torture_ , in his mind. Worse than dying again and again.

Or was it? —— No. No, it wasn't. _And yet_.

Silence stretches again as they look at each other, and Booker has all but given up on getting an answer then she said, “Yes,” quietly. An admittance greater than all the wealth on the earth and it lies over his chest, a crushing thing. Andromache of Scythia wanted to die —— he had thought it most likely she would echo his morbid desire, but hadn’t imagined she actually would. Certainly hadn’t thought she would say it so simply. So plainly.

Their gazes remained locked for what could have been moments or minutes before he closed his again and reached for her hand and she took his and they sat there in silence once more. He felt understood and seen, yet there was an instinctive fear at the thought of her, of any of his family, dying that twisted in the marrow of his bones. Something as intrinsic and familiar to him as despair.

* * *

He kissed another woman sometime in the 1920s and felt little guilt and then a rush of reflexive guilt for the lack thereof. It was a strange quagmire, his impulse to remain faithful to his long dead wife for all that it had been a century since she passed and he still remained. There was a loneliness in him that the others couldn’t quite fill and he craved companionship, though he knew that it was transient by nature. It would be foolish and reckless, to crave for romantic love from a mortal whom he would have to leave so quickly, and so he didn’t.

But there was still the matter of companionship, wasn’t there?

He kissed another man sometime in the 1980s and felt a small thrill and the sharp edge of old Catholic guilt. That was far easier to brush aside.

* * *

As technology advanced it became more and more difficult for them to disappear and stay hidden. News started to be broadcast everywhere and anywhere and Andy’s cynical nature only grew in response to it all, and Booker couldn’t blame her. Couldn’t even begin to. They started to spend more time apart, the four of them, though never for very long. A year, at most, which was nothing in the grand scheme of most of their lives. Somewhat more notable in his, given that barely two centuries didn’t even scratch the surface of thousands of years, but he found himself strung out in their absences.

Andy needed to be alone, sometimes. Joe and Nicky liked to travel and be together, go off and do saccharinely romantic things and enjoy their piece of eternity. While it was harder for them to disappear and stay of the radar, it was easier to get from point A to point B, especially given Booker's abilities with forgery. It was less of a learning curve than one might assume, and he made them each ten different sets of identities with paperwork and passports to go along with them, and thus traveling was a breeze.

Booker needed alone time, too, before his temper ran too short and his anger too hot, but he didn’t think he needed it as much as Andy did, or at least he didn’t enjoy it as much as she did. He traveled, like the rest of them, went through burner phones and wandered from place to place, but being alone grated on him. When he had been growing up he was surrounded by his siblings and his parents and a happy, full household. When he had married he had been with his wife and then his sons until he went off to war, where he was surrounded by his brothers in arms, until he wasn't.

The loneliness that had clawed at him the first time he died gutted him. He wasn’t sure if he had ever retrieved all of his innards again, in truth. He found himself listless, stuck in dark moods and turning to alcohol whenever he could, then, and found himself in a similar state, now, lifetimes after the fact. Hands itching and knee bobbing and head throbbing. He fell into the arms and beds of men and women, a bandage over a stab wound mired in guilt. Hemorrhaging. He was hemorrhaging, but he’d been bleeding out for years. Years upon years.

Time and time again he found himself at the bottom of a glass and wanting, perishing, languishing. Eternally feeling as though he had dug himself a grave and laid in it, staring at the sky, waiting.

That was why Copley found him.

* * *

“Fuck off,” was easy enough to say at the sight of the man who he knew immediately had been digging too far and made connections that he shouldn’t have. They were standing somewhere in Amsterdam, where he had taken up brief residence in one of their hideaways, passing through more than anything else. He had tried to lose Copley, but had failed on that front, and the proposal that he had made his headache even _worse_.

How fucked up was it that he was immortal and still had to deal with headaches?

“Booker, hear me out,” Copley said, cutting him off as he tried to step around the man to get on with his eventful day of drinking and maybe seeking out companionship later, though maybe just drinking and ruminating, keeping an eye and ear out for anyone who needed help. He stared at Copley, eyes narrowed. “You guys can help people, _save_ people. Think of all the good you could do. Merrick Industries is looking to extend human life, cure diseases, put a stop to suffering. All we need is some samples from all of you, that’s _all_.”

He was prepared to tell the man to fuck off again and maybe kill him for his efforts, given that his knowledge of all of them was dangerous and it would be easier to get rid of the ex-CIA now, rather than later, until a thought occurred to him. Like finding the final puzzle piece after searching for it for ages. Like waking from death for the millionth time.

“Could Merrick Industries reverse immortality?” he stepped closer to Copley, a sharp movement that the other man didn’t back away from, though looked at him with faint trepidation. Maybe it was the eagerness in his voice.

“I… don’t see why not, after a time,” Copley said after a brief pause, sounding bewildered, as if he didn’t understand why Booker would be after such information. “They’re at the forefront of scientific advancement, if they had some samples I’m sure they could figure something out.”

“Then take samples from me,” Booker stepped closer, and Copley stepped back. It was best not to involve the others in this. Best not to endanger them, if it was only him then ——

“They require samples from all of you, I’m afraid,” Copley sounded almost apologetic, looked it, too, for all that Booker scowled at him. “In case of genetic variability, and all. We may have to bring some of you into the lab, too, to run a few tests.”

It was mostly the headache speaking, but Booker wanted nothing more than to punch this man in the throat at this very moment. “So you want to throw us in cages,” he said blandly, with a hint of fury, thinking of drowning and returning and drowning again.

“God, no,” Copley sounded taken aback by the suggestion. “No, we just want to see if we can help humanity. Listen, I have a plan to extract some samples, and maybe that will be enough.”

* * *

Booker, like the goddamn fool he was, listened.

There was nothing quite like the promise of oblivion. Like the promise of _the end_. Even if he had to compromise, a few places. Even if he had to agree to let some of them get taken, and then more of them. Even if he had his stomach torn open and guts spewed and was sick, not with the carnage, but with the familiar taste of bitter guilt when Joe and Nicky were taken, kept afloat only by the promise that Copley had promised that no excess harm would come to them.

How much was _excess_ , though?

It was going to be worth it. It had to be worth it.

* * *

He liked Nile. Liked her spirit and her attitude and her resolve. Sympathized with her and her desire to see her family once more, enough so that he strongly cautioned her against it at all costs, remembering too sharply the fury and hatred that love had borne. The resentment that festered. The sorrow that lingered in the chasm of his chest, neverending and yawning, threatening to swallow him whole at all times. _Don’t be like me_.

Sympathized with her and pitied her, that she was subject to this life, too. But not for long, maybe. Not for long, hopefully.

 _Don’t you ever want it to end_?

Dear Lord, though I have not spoken to you in what feels like lifetimes, please let the end come soon. Amen.

* * *

It wasn’t worth it.

Surprise.

* * *

Betrayal, he supposed, was worse than death. Death came and went and took life and sauntered away. Death could be dealt by a stranger or an enemy or a friend, it could be personal or impersonal. Betrayal, on the other hand, was always something personal. Always something given by someone trusted and loved, otherwise it wouldn’t be betrayal. It was the sharpest knife, the deadliest thing, a terrible fate to hand to another when you loved them so deeply and absolutely.

Booker had betrayed them. He knew this. He wouldn’t dare deny it nor refute it. Any and all defense of his actions was lost when Andy was bleeding out on the floor of Copley’s apartment by his own hand, when she screamed and struggled beneath the guards as she was sedated as he struggled and raged at them and pleaded that they leave her because she wasn’t immortal anymore, _fuck_ Andromache wasn’t immortal anymore, when he saw the state that Joe and Nicky were in.

Human cruelty knew no bounds. He knew that well. But he had hoped, against sense and reason, that they wouldn’t be treated so terribly. Had trusted Copley’s word in saying that they wouldn’t be stuck there or mistreated or trapped as if they were at the bottom of the ocean, perishing. It was shortsighted of him. Selfish.

He had wanted to die. He hadn’t wanted to take all of them with him.

He hadn’t expected anything less from Joe and Nicky. Andy absconding but to mediate made sense, given the situation. Nile’s compulsion to forgive him, because she, perhaps, understood why he had wanted to badly to end this eternal curse on their existence, was sweet, but useless in the end because she was a child and he hadn't betrayed _her_. Joe and Nicky love each other above all else, and he had put them through hell out of his own selfish desire to make everything _stop_. They may love him and he loved them, but love couldn’t fix that. Love didn’t fix much at all, really. Booker had an immense amount of love bleeding from him, but when has that ever helped any situations at all?

He deserved their judgement.

To say that he would rather die than be without them for a hundred years was an understatement, and something they all knew already besides. It was why they had chosen it, he was certain, standing on that beach staring after them as they ascended the stairs with one last lingering look from Joe, leaving him behind. Desolation washed over him in that instant, the instinct to wade into the ocean and drown himself strong. It was there and then gone, washed away by the waves, and he thought distantly of Quynh. She had been alone for five hundred years, a cycle of death. A fate worse than eternal life.

This was a prison of his own making. Something perfectly crafted by his own hands. It was only Joe and Nicky’s hands that shut the door and locked the key, is all. Now, for the first time in all of his existence, he was well and truly alone.

He pressed his face into his hands and dropped into a crouch and gasped, something wet and thick, and remained there for a while. Crying.

* * *

During the first month he wasn’t sober for even a moment, constantly drinking and constantly drunk, barely leaving his small apartment except to restock on alcohol. He didn’t eat much at all, if anything, and wondered over the jagged edges of the grave that he had dug for himself.

During the second month he was sober more than he was drunk, though just barely. He didn’t do much but sleep, except he didn’t sleep much either because when he slept she was drowning and when he awoke he was drowning, too. There wasn’t much. There wasn’t anything, really.

During the third month he shot himself in the head, gun pressed to his temple. Only once, though. The mess was a bother to clean up and his head throbbed fiercely for a week straight, after. He sought out the home where his family had lived, drunken and despairing. It wasn’t there anymore.

During the fourth month he read through the entirety of the _Bibliothèque Mazarine_ , and a quarter of the American Library in Paris. His hands itched for something to do and his mind scratched at his skull, desperate for stimulation, and he acquiesced. He snuck a flask of alcohol in, of course.

During the fifth month he continued his trek through the libraries until he got bored of reading and vaguely thought about looking for Quynh, even though the ocean was vast and infinite and he hadn’t the faintest clue where the _hell_ she could be, except that he knew where she was when she was pushed into the ocean. Currents, however, were unpredictable, and any attempt would be foolhardy at best.

During the sixth month, Quynh showed up at his apartment, which was nearly enough to scare him to death.

If only.

* * *

Booker didn’t ask Quynh why she showed up in his apartment or why she stayed, sharing his space with him and sleeping on his bed beside him, a deliberate space between their bodies. If it was simply to get the dreams to stop, he imagined that she would had seen him and immediately departed to find Nile and, presumably, the others. But she didn’t and she stayed and he wondered over that inasmuch as he didn’t. It wasn’t his business, exactly, and this was a stranger for all that he had been dreaming about her for the past two centuries, and her of him.

There was a near constantly haunted look about her, gaunt and half dead for all that she was poised and purposeful with all of her movements. Drowning for five hundred years at the bottom of the ocean would do that to you, he guessed, and she was twitchy at times and eerily serene at others.

“Is Andromache well?” she asked once, when tending to one of the many plants that she had gotten while he sat cross legged on the ground, perusing another book. He had been drinking less, with her around. Less reason to.

“Last I saw her, yeah,” sorrow panged through him at the thought of Andy, and he wondered how much he should tell her. Wondered if she already knew, and imagined that she did, given how she looked at him. The dreams were always incongruous, but given her consistent unconsciousness he imagined that she put together enough to know that he was a traitor, and that was why he was isolated. “She’s not immortal, anymore.”

There was a brief pause to Quynh’s movements, a faint tremor to her hands, before she continued to tend to the plants.

“And Yusuf and Niccolò?”

“As good as can be. Still eternally in love.”

“Mm… and Nile? What is she like?”

“Strong,” Booker said easily, flipping a page in the book he wasn’t reading lazily. “Determined, deliberate, and kind. She’s a kid, barely more than an infant, but she’s impressive.”

And that was all.

Booker had his theories, of course. By and large they centered around Quynh being unwilling to face Andy and the others for one reason or another. Because she had died for five hundred years straight and they hadn’t found her, maybe. Booker said, once, bleary and drunk and shocked to hell and back at the sight of a familiar face standing in his apartment, drinking tea calmly, that they had looked for her. That they spent decades looking for her. A strange expression had made its way over her face and was gone in the next instant when he told her. Maybe she wanted to kill them for their apparent betrayal, but didn't want to hurt them. Or maybe she avoided it out of some irrational fear or another.

It wasn’t his business and, selfishly, he enjoyed her company. Enjoyed having _someone_ around. A century alone was a harrowing prospect, six months alone had been terrible in and of themselves, but Quynh was a presence and something familiar. She was quiet, at first, and measured, and looked at him oddly from time to time, but it was that same shared life experience that brought them together and made her stay.

Booker deserved to spend a hundred years alone, if not more, in this prison of his own making. But having some form of company was a boon, and one that he took greedily.

* * *

Quynh didn’t like water. Bathing and showering were out of the question, sometimes.

Booker didn’t mind. He had been averse to water, too.

* * *

“Let’s go elsewhere,” Quynh said in Vietnamese suddenly one gloomy Sunday morning as they sat in the kitchen. He had been awake for some time, unable to sleep and exhausted from it. She had just woken up, though he knew her sleep wasn’t especially restful either.

“What?” he said, also in Vietnamese, which they tended to speak in. Vietnamese, or French. He blinked at her with a half eaten croissant from the delicious bakery down the street in his hand, the newspaper spread out in front of him on the table. Booker had been planning on staying in Paris in this apartment for at least a half a decade, if not longer if he could swing it, for sake of ease. “Now?”

“Yes,” she said, brow raising, “no time like the present.”

Booker tossed the rest of the croissant into his mouth and chewed it, considering her with a tilted head. “Why?” he said after swallowing, watching her pick apart a pastry on the tablecloth.

Quynh seemed to debate for a moment before saying, resigned, “They’re coming.”

At once a sense of elation filled him at the idea of seeing the others, of seeing his family, again. Her eyes tracked him, taking note of that, and taking note of how the joy left him in a sudden rush, as he was still in isolation and they would likely not want to see him. Or would see him, but Joe and Nicky still wouldn’t speak to him, the way they hadn’t even offered a goodbye, which had been expected and earned but still smarted all the same. He didn’t want to see them at all, he realized dully, nor did they want to see him. Andy would be glad to see him again, he was sure, and Nile would be pleased, maybe, but. _But_.

“Where to?”

* * *

“You betrayed them,” she said one night in Germany. She spoke plainly, without judgment, vivid clarity in her eyes.

“Yes,” he said, just as simply. “I wanted to die. I didn’t think that they would get hurt.”

“That was shortsighted,” she nudged his shin with her foot and he laughed, dry and grating. “You were blinded by desperation. Dying would hurt them. Dying always hurts.”

A pause. “They would move on. I’ve barely been part of their lives —— two hundred years, compared to thousands?”

“They love you,” she said as she propped her foot on his knee.

He rested his hand on her shin and stared into the fire they had made in the small woodstone oven and didn’t say anything at all, in response. What was there to say? _I’m sorry_? That was displacement at its prime, and the words would be useless. Quynh had caught on as quickly as the rest of them that he wanted to die. That he still wanted to die.

Maybe he’d never stop.

They love him, but was that enough? When has love ever been enough?

* * *

Sebastian hated Russia. Hated its cold and its hard ground and its endless snows, how it stole away his brothers who perished to it. Who lost limbs, toes. He remained untouched by the unforgiving winter that their Emperor was intent to spill blood through, but for the fact that he was so fucking cold all the time. His toes froze. His fingers froze. But they always came back.

Booker, not so much. Fuck the cold and all that, but he bundled himself thoroughly and made his way through the streets, half wraith and half man, maybe just as crazed as Sebastian had been, killing in the name of some damn monarch with aspirations of ruling the world. Just as crazed, probably, given that they were the same man, even after all these years. Strolling through the streets of Moscow is easy as anything, easy as everything, their army hadn’t even been close to this place. Still, he was tempered, somewhat, by necessity alone.

He told Quynh about his past experiences in Russia tucked away in another small apartment, heat on full blast because she hated the cold, too. Just wasn’t built for it, so she said, and she was from a far more tropical climate. She responded with mild bemusement about the tactic of launching a full scale attack on a northern country in the dead of winter and Booker laughed, agreeing, before quieting.

“I was conscripted into Napolean’s Army,” he said, idly cleaning a gun. “I was a forger, scrounging together a living for my family. I was caught and told it was death on a noose or death on the battlefield.”

Quynh watched him, eyes dark and intent.

“I didn’t want to die in the service of a tyrant,” he laughed, hard and humorless, before setting the gun aside and picking up another. “I wanted to live against all odds. I wanted to see my family again. I got my wish.”

“Did you stay with them?”

He didn’t have to ask her to clarify what she meant. “Yes,” how fucked up was it, that he couldn’t remember the faces of his family? That all he could remember was how they looked like when they died. The anger and rage with which his son regarded him on his death bed.

“So did I,” Quynh said, chin propped on her knee from where she had folded herself into a chair. “But there wasn’t much choice, then. It took over a century for Andromache to find me.”

“A century alone,” there was a bitter edge to his voice.

“I gave up, by the end,” she was tearing apart a bit of bread, movements methodical and slow. “I laid down to die, all alone. I must have died hundreds of times, laying there. But then Andromache found me.”

That’s the eternal pattern, wasn’t it? _But then Andromache found me_.

* * *

  
  


“Do you want to visit Vietnam?” he said one frigid winter afternoon with the weak sun above as they picked their way through the market and he picked out the items and handed them to her to inspect more closely. He had done his best to fill her in on the major historical events that she had missed, and she had supplemented with news and books. Quynh had been, understandably, incensed by the French occupation of Vietnam, followed by a senseless and bloody war. But she hadn't mentioned it otherwise.

Booker wasn’t sure why he asked. Just that it felt right to.

She looked critically at a fish on a stand which stared back at her, gaping. “Perhaps we can go there, next.”

“Where are they?”

“A few cities over.”

* * *

“How did you get free?” he asked as they made their way across China. It wasn’t the kindest thing to ask by far, but it was a question that burned between them for the past several months of their travels.

Quynh looked at him with a distant expression on her face, heavy melancholy settling over her. She gave him a wan smile, before looking away. He took that as the answer it was.

* * *

The first time he died for Quynh they were freeing children from being trafficked and he compulsively jumped in front of a hail of bullets for her, shielded her body with his own, the way he had shielded Andy, mortal and bleeding still, so desperately. Dying sucked, it always did, but it was par for the course, at this point. Bullets tearing their way through his body was child’s play, and he didn’t mind dying so much. Didn’t mind dying for someone else even less.

He didn’t want her to die more, is all. She had died thousands of times over. Millions. An eternal, terrible cycle.

When he came back to, his head was in her lap and she was looking at him, a hand on his forehead, her expression calm. Not placid in the least, Booker doubted that she had ever been placid in all of her life, but she looked at him steadily. “Thank you,” she said as he winced and several rounds were forced out of his body, clattering to the ground.

They were surrounded by dead bodies and spilled blood and Booker knew that he loved her as just as he loved the rest of them. In that unbreakable and immortal way of his. That she was his family, too, no longer an open secret to swallow whenever he would awake with a gasp as though he hadn’t tasted air in decades, half hidden for the sake of the others. She was here, wiping blood from his face, and he supposed that he had loved her for hundreds of years.

* * *

Quynh regarded Vietnam with a palpable sense of detachment. It was no wonder, given that it had been a thousand years since she had last been here, hundreds since she had been part of society at all. She became accustomed to technology easily enough, though when it came to vehicular travel she was skeptical about planes, which was fair enough.

Time changed things, it was an inevitable happenstance. This country was different, wartorn and scrabbled back together, unsteady in places though the people remained vibrant and lively. Booker hadn’t been there since the Vietnam War, himself, and there was an energy that he had sensed, then, that came back full force. No longer dulled by the weight of omnipresent death and destruction hovering over their heads. It was a beautiful place, dense jungles and jumbled markets full of delicious food and cryers selling their wares.

She made a face at all of the remnants of the French occupation of Vietnam and took to the food, otherwise, with gusto and while he doubted that she could ever consider it _home_ again, if she had at all since leaving it to find Andromache, she grew to enjoy it there. Quynh haggled with grace and ease and linked arms with Booker as they walked through the streets and insisted that they rent a motorcycle to get around, which he was perfectly fine with.

They rented an apartment rather than using one of the safehouses that they had tucked away. Booker had more than enough money in his accounts that they could live off of comfortably, but they did odd jobs to fill their days and help people around them. Small things, inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, carrying things here and there, fixing some faulty wiring, finding a lost child and returning them home.

Lunar New Year rolled around and they celebrated with the rest. Quynh purchased a bright red _áo dài_ with a curling golden dragon embroidered into the silk and rangled him into a simpler one, though it took them some time to find one that fit him. They cleaned the apartment from top to bottom the day before and handed out red envelopes to passing children the first day, and he painstakingly arranged fruit beneath Quynh’s critical eye, groaning whenever she asked him to move an orange several places to the left, and then back, and then back again.

She was fucking with him, but he was too glad to mind.

When parades rolled by they popped firecrackers from the second floor and had masks tossed their way when they entered the fray and a drum was shoved into Booker’s hands that he played along with easily enough. Quynh was bright, here, the haunted expression that constantly followed her replaced by a curious joy, swept up in celebration. This wasn’t the country that she had been born in, anymore, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t resonate in its happiness as a time of good tidings and luck made everything all the more vivid.

It wasn’t surprising when they returned to their apartment after the fifth day of New Years celebrations to find the others waiting for them. It should’ve been, he supposed, but the steady shift in Quynh had given it away.

Joe’s hair was longer and pulled into a bun at the nape of his neck and he was leaning against the tiny kitchen counter, his knee pressed against Nicky’s side, whose hair was probably approximately the same but tucked beneath a hat at the moment, sitting at the similarly tiny kitchen table. Nile’s hair was dreaded; she had been looking at their small collection of books, though she turned when they entered, taking in how they were flushed and sweaty from the day of celebrations. Andy, who had shaved a side of her head, was standing near the back of the apartment, next to the door that led into the bedroom, her arms crossed and still looking quite the same as the last time he had saw her.

No wonder, since it had only been two years and some odd change.

The laughter and conversation that Booker and Quynh had been immersed in dissipated and silence reigned in its place as they all took each other in. Andy looked like she was seeing a ghost, and he supposed that she was. Nicky and Joe, too. Nile looked at Quynh with a wide eyes, as though she couldn’t believe what she was saying, before looking at Booker.

Fuck. Only two or three years out of a hundred.

“ _Chúc Mừng Năm Mới_ ,” he said, breaking the silence as surely as glass shattering, It seemed to stir Andy, who shifted, still staring at Quynh with a measure of trepidation, regret, and shock. Nicky glanced at him, as did Joe, though Booker didn’t look at them in return. Instead, he set aside the drum that he had been handed, unbuttoning the high collar of his _áo dài_ as he turned back towards the door. “I’ll get out of your hair,” he said over his shoulder, and he fled. There was no better word for it, really.

The moon was high in the sky and waxy as the last bits of celebration seemed to peter off in the air. A mother shouted for her child and he made a note of that, cast his gaze around, kept an ear open. He _could_ leave, with just the clothes on his back and the pistol that he had tucked into the waistband of his pants, but it would be annoying to get around without his paperwork for his current identity or the rest of his things.

He made his way towards one of their outposts, quite automatically, intercepted a gaggle of kids who couldn’t be older than ten (infants, hardly more than fetuses) and told them to go home before something could happen to them. Drank from the flask that was constantly present somewhere on his person, and was acutely aware of the draining loneliness that had opened within him once more. Inevitable. Inexorable.

Booker could hope that they would let him return to them, that Nile appealed to them, but it was unlikely and he knew it. He could hope that Quynh would choose to stay with him and keep traveling with him, but that was even more unlikely than unearned forgiveness, how that she had allowed them to catch up to them. Now that Andy was there.

If the mortals around him were little more than infants, if Nile was an infant, than he was nothing more than a child. Funny, how two hundred years made him so.

The safehouse was on the edge of the city and was covered in a thick layer of dust, enough so that he sneezed upon first entering, though he didn’t bother to remove any of it. Instead, he shed his _áo dài_ and put on a set of spare clothes and threw himself onto the bed, staring at the water stained ceiling and breathing. Just breathing. All at once, he had no energy to do anything else with himself. He felt flayed open, as if his skin had been torn back and his sternum cracked and he was spilling, that eternal hemorrhage overflowing and leaving him empty. A void.

Maybe he should’ve insisted that Quynh return to the others. Maybe he should’ve left her in his apartment in Paris for the others to inevitably catch up. Maybe and maybe and _maybe_ , though none of that really mattered, now.

Two or three goddamn years into a hundred.

Booker was selfish. Greedy and needy, mired in melancholy and an impenetrable misery. Full of love that’s ill given and ill shaped and worthless, in the end, for all that he hung onto it all the same. This was a prison of his own making and a loophole had presented itself and he had taken it, enjoyed her company for all that he knew that Quynh was unlikely to stay with him for a hundred years straight. He was a dumb fuck, but he had common sense.

And he had _hoped_ , the way only a dumb fuck could.

Minutes or hours or days later he was aware of the door to the safehouse opening, though he didn’t shift nor sit up nor do much of anything. He just breathed, instead, as less familiar footsteps made their way across the room, a not quite so familiar sneeze. Nile, then.

“I hope you don’t mind me, uh, crashing,” she said after several long moments of silence. “That was definitely a conversation that shouldn’t involve me... and it was about to turn violent.”

“Not at all,” he said, waving his hand lazily, a cloud of dust kicking up as he dropped it back to the bed. “Make yourself at home. My safe house is your safe house." A pause, as he hears her shuffle. "I’m not supposed to be in contact with you.”

“Yeah, and I argued to just forgive you,” Nile was moving around the safehouse. Looking at it, he guessed, at the small trinkets that they left lying around some eternity ago. “Nicky and Joe passed their judgment and I passed mine. I wanted to keep in contact with you, but it’s hard to do that when we go through burner phones like they’re candy.”

“You wanted to keep in contact with me?” he repeated, dully surprised.

“Of course,” a chair scraped and groaned beneath her weight as she sat in it. Neither of them said anything for a minute as he laid with that information, “I was angry when I realized that you sold them out,” he blinked tiredly and closed his eyes, “but when I heard your reasons I… understood. I didn’t want to leave behind my mom or brother. I wanted to talk to them and hug them again and get a place in the neighborhood that I grew up in. Get married, have kids, I dunno. I just wanted to _live my life_ , and that was taken from me against my will. I would’ve done anything to not be immortal, anymore.”

“I’m sorry, Nile,” useless apologies, and all that.

“It’s okay,” she said, and he knew she didn’t mean it because he never meant it, either. “You fucked up, and you’re paying the price, but leaving you alone for a century… I know I’d go crazy.”

Booker snorted, humorless as he opened his eyes, stared at the ceiling again. “I lost my mind within a day. I was a goddamn mess and just dragging myself back together when Quynh showed up one day. I’m not sure if I would’ve pulled myself together at all, if she hadn’t been there.”

“You kept her sane, too,” Nile said, the chair creaking as she shifted on it.

He didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing at all as silence settled around them again. He was least familiar with her, now, after months of traveling with Quynh, but thought that he understood her the most. He and Andy had an unspoken understanding, too, one that transcended the necessity for language, but that was limited by how differently they operated. He loved her and would bleed himself dry for her and they were both desperately lonely, but she had thousands of years to sit upon and be resigned to her loneliness, and he was practically a child to her. Booker had betrayed all of them for both of them, that hadn't been a lie, but he hadn't truly known if Andy would've embraced the chance to end her immortality for good.

_Don’t you ever want it to end? Yes._

Nile was young. Painfully so. Young and powerful. She carried herself like a woman constantly at war, and mourned for the loss of her family. He could only imagine that she was mourning still. He had warned her off of contacting them and felt an immense sense of relief when she told him that Copley was going to make it look like she had been killed in action, severing her ties from them, avoiding needless and excessive suffering. Would her brother or her mother have reacted the same way his son had? There was no way to tell, but words couldn’t fully explain how painful it was to watch the people you love die around you, whereas you cannot, and you had no ability to help them. No way to save them.

He wanted to save her from this hell, but there was no saving any of them. He hadn’t wanted her, a veritable baby, to be swept up in the mess that he had made, but there was no helping it. She had saved all of them from his own reckless mistakes.

Time passed again before the chair scraped against the floor and Nile made her way over to the bed, throwing herself back against it, showering them both in dust. They coughed and he found himself laughing, briefly, before settling. They took up both sides of the bed, with several inches between them, and he wiped dust from his eyes.

Something was dropped onto his chest and when he peered at it he found it to be a phone from the mid—2000s or so, something that flipped and was, in this day and age, dated, to say the least. “We’re gonna keep in touch,” Nile said, with no small measure of determination, and he looked at her with his brows raised. “What? We’re a group, but Nicky and Joe can’t control who I talk to, especially when you’re part of the group, too.”

Several things to say flitted through his mind all at once and he wondered if she could tell that he was hemorrhaging, too. Booker didn’t exactly go to great lengths to hide his suicidal tendencies, or his death wishes. This was a show of rebellion, maybe, but of care, certainly. _She didn’t want him to be alone_. “Thank you,” is what he finally settled on, exhausted and weary, but smiling faintly all the same.

“Copley has some stuff for you too, I think,” Nile said after a brief pause where she smiled in return. “Situations that only require one person… to keep you busy.”

“I guess I can’t fall off the grid, then.”

“Nope.”

“You drive a hard bargain, Nile.”

“Aww, it’s cute that you think we’re bargaining.”

* * *

Their elbows bumped a few times when they spoke, quietly, about their families. It was like carving out his heart with a dull knife, to talk about them, but it had been decades since Booker had, memories half faded and not quite right, and he got the sense that Nile was desperate to talk about her mom’s laugh and her brother’s hobbies. He looked at pictures of her family on the disconnected phone that she had been permitted to keep and felt no small amount of jealousy over the fact that she would have these pictures of them, at least, preserved for as long as she kept the phone safe.

But then, was it better to forget what the people you loved look like? Or was it better to look at them and be reminded that you will never again speak to them? He didn't know. Didn't ask.

They fell asleep, at some point, lying on the bed. They woke up sometime the next day to the door to the safehouse opening and Booker pulled his gun immediately, twisting to face the door with one foot on the ground and one knee on the bed as Nile jolted awake beside him. Andy was standing there, Quynh and Joe and Nicky just behind, and Booker all but threw the gun to his side, as if it burned him. He had more than enough of pointing his gun at Andy, quite frankly.

The four of them looked like they hadn’t slept all night and dragged themselves through hell, instead, but there was a sense of relief about them that was evident in the set of Andy’s shoulders and the slight lift to the haunted look in Quynh’s eyes. Joe and Nicky looked exhausted but pleased, though they looked at him with considering and remarkably reserved expressions.

Well, Booker was the reason why they were tortured in front of each other. Betrayal, and all.

“Done talking?” Nile said as she stood from the bed and brushed dust off of her.

“For now,” Andy said, glancing back at Quynh briefly, who gave her a small smile. She crossed the threshold, and Booker struggled to remember for a moment that she wasn’t immortal anymore, for all that she continued to carry herself in just the same way. “Come on, we got word from Copley.”

Nile grabbed the bag that she had on the table and Booker looked away from Joe and Nicky as she approached him and gave him a firm hug, muttering beside his ear, “Remember, keep in touch.”

He squeezed her in return and said nothing as she pulled away and Andy stepped into her place, instead, looking at him intently. Still that fathomless and bottomless gaze, as though she could see directly into his soul. He guessed that she very well could. “I told you to have faith,” she said, clasping the back of his neck and squeezing it, “You look like hell.”

“So do you,” he said dryly, allowing himself to be pulled into another embrace.

“Do me a favor, Book,” she said, and he saw Quynh getting closer over her shoulder. She looked at him intently and intensely, expression solemn as she shook him firmly, as if that would put some sense into him, “Try to live this time, will you?”

“No promises, boss,” he said with a lopsided grin and she sighed, patting his face, before stepping aside and back, moving fluidly around Quynh as if it hadn’t been five hundred years since they last fought beside or saw each other. An easy awareness, hard won through time and force of will. Their shoulders brushed as they crossed paths: easy, too.

They would be okay, as if there was any doubt. All of them would be okay, and he was glad for that. Innards carved out, but glad all the same.

“We still need to visit India,” Quynh pulled him into a brief and strong hug, before stepping back, “I’ll call you when I can.”

“Of course,” he said, for lack of anything else to say.

The five of them stood at the door to the safehouse and stared at him, for a time, as his familiar companion sorrow began to loop its way around his neck and down his spine once more, and he offered them a wan smile. Didn’t try to hide the despair brightening his eyes. They knew, they always knew. Joe nodded, briefly, and Nicky tilted his head, and then they were gone.

Ninety-seven or so years to go.

* * *

_FIVE YEARS LATER? TEN YEARS, MAYBE? WHO THE FUCK KNOWS AT THIS POINT, TIME IS RELATIVE._

He fucked up. What a surprise, really, that Booker of all people fucked up.

His memory was fragmented, in places. He remembered getting a call from Copley for an assignment somewhere in the United States and flying across the world and landing and beginning to dismantle a small operation and then… not much more. Being taken out, taken down, thrown somewhere or other. Realized that the information had been bad and being dully amused over this twist of fate. He’d been killed here, oh, dozens of times. Hundreds of times. His body was one exposed and frayed nerve and he felt crazed, frenetic, jerking and unable to move, captured and tortured and _watched_.

Well, that was about what he deserved anyways.

He can’t remember how long it had been and it didn’t matter much, anyways. Time was relative and if he was going to spend the rest of his terribly prolonged existence here, then that suited him just as fine.

He _had_ been doing better, somewhat. With direction and purpose he fell less into his spells of heavy melancholy, but he wasn’t immune to them. Not by half. There were months that he spent lying around, unable to get up, unable to move or motivate himself in the least. There were months that he was constantly moving, eternally on the go, running as if hell hounds were at his heels. He still drank, of course, but he was sober more than he was drunk, at least. Reached out to people, to mortals. Even had a few short lived relationships, brief and transient, and helped people where he could. Tried to _live_ , the way that Andy wanted him to, even though that listless loneliness never abated. Would never abate, as long as he was apart from them.

Being without them was like missing a lung.

Even if he spoke to Nile at least once a week and Quynh had a fascinating tendency to show up wherever he was at random and they would travel together for a time, before she inevitably returned to Andy, and the others by extension. There remained to be silence from Joe and Nicky and Andy was relatively quiet, too, though there were a few occasions where she took the phone from Nile to ask him how he was doing.

Those little shreds weren’t nearly enough. They couldn’t be. Not when he wasn’t with them physically, not when Joe wouldn’t tousel his hair and he couldn’t hug Nicky or witness firsthand Nile’s growth as a warrior. It helped, though. More than it hurt, and god did it hurt a lot, to maintain those small connections. To remember that they were out there, and while he wasn’t alone, he wasn’t entirely alone, even if he felt more ghost than man half the time.

Not that he had spoken to any of them in who the fuck knows how long.

But yes, he had been doing better after a decade or however long it had been and now he was here, staring at the dim light overhead as a knife met his skin once more and he was flayed. He had joked, a few times, out of his mind and desperate, that he was hemorrhaging and eventually he was bound to bleed out and what would they do, then? Whoever these fucks were ignored him, content to watch with morbid and scientific fascination how much they could remove from him before he perished and started healing.

This time they had dissected his throat. Took out his thyroid, poked at his esophagus, his trachea, pried his left femur from his body, pulled his abdomen open. Stole samples upon samples from him, a steady stream, blood dripping and tools clattering between his shouts and screams of pain. It hurt, it hurt, of fucking _course_ it fucking hurt, until it didn’t.

Died, again. Oh well. At least they hadn't cracked open his skull, this time. His head still ached from putting itself back together.

Time for it to start all over again.

It was surprising, to say the least, when he came to with a jerk and a choked scream, to find Joe leaning over him, eyes wide and expression stricken. “What the fuck,” he said, or tried to say given the fact that they had mutilated his throat. Booker wondered, for a moment, if he had actually, finally, died and had been delivered to whatever afterlife may or may not exist. As if there were any such thing.

“Book,” Joe said, relief burning in his voice, and Booker was certain that if he wasn’t dead he was _definitely_ dreaming. The straps binding him to the table were loosened and he didn’t move, couldn't move even if he wanted to considering he was going to spill his guts everywhere yet again, though Joe pulled him upright in spite of the way that he screamed out of pain. He looked apologetic, at least, his brows tightly furrowed.

Nicky was at his other side and had unstrapped him. Nile was shooting a man in the head. Quynh was wiping blood off of the blade that she was holding. Andy was walking towards him, a blazing look on her face, and it occurred to him that she looked older. Still whole and hale and healthy, but older, face scarred, grey in her hair. The realization made his lungs shudder.

His throat sealed itself back together and he inhaled, listed to the side. Nicky caught him. Joe held fast to him. “Hey, guys,” he said, voice mangled and still fixing itself, and Quynh laid a hand over his uninjured knee gently. “What a weird coincidence. I guess Copley didn’t trust me to finish the job.”

Joe squeezed the back of his neck and Nile swatted at his foot, though she at least had the good grace to wince in an unspoken apology when he gave a short scream as his femur started to grow back from where it had been removed. They pressed in around him, all of them surrounding him as if to act as a shield. Andy leaned forwards and pressed their foreheads together, staring into hie eyes and giving him a clear view of the lines that had begun to wrinkle her face, and he breathed. And breathed.

He felt steady, washed ashore. As if he had come home, at last.

_What brings you to Marrakesh?_

_Family._

**Author's Note:**

> listen, i'm just a sucker for found family and depressed remorseful dumbasses who fuck up majorly. also i'm gonna be fucking pissed if quynh is evil in the sequel. feel free to follow me on twitter [@widowgast](https://twitter.com/widowgast) and/or my tumblr [drianpavus](http://drianpavus.tumblr.com/), if you'd like.


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